Unni Toivola

We love Unni’s raw, expressive and explosive expressions. Her manners feels bold and pleasantly fragmented with overlapping patched patterns and motifs.

We discovered artist Unni Toivola (b. 1991) and her amazing work through the urban art project #ArtMadeThis where we had the opportunity to select one of the contributing artists and make a poster collection for Fine Little Day. Toivola works and lives in Gothenburg where she took her Bachelor Degree in Design at HDK School of Design and Crafts 2016.

Toivolas artistry has its foundation in painting, but has explored and branched to textiles and sculpture as well, where her unique expression is recognizable cross media. Toivolas artistic approach is best described as process-based, where the process and curiosity drives her forward and which significantly appears in her end-results – where repetition and disassembled of artworks lead to new motives.

For Fine Little Day, Unni Toivola has made motifs applied on posters and textile.

Your working method, do you work with sketches or just intuitively?
It’s mostly sketches actually. I usually sketch small pieces at a time, much like the drawing game Exquisite corpse. I draw, fold the paper, draw again, fold it away, sketch a new piece and so on. So I don’t see the whole picture until later when I unfold it. And then it might be good, or not good at all. It feels boring to over think things. I often repeat the same motif several times just to feel the difference in the result, between the woven and the painted, even though it is the same motif.
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